Web Programming, Linux System Administation, and Entrepreneurship in Athens Georgia

Quick Fix for Dovecot’s “save failed to INBOX: Timeout while waiting for lock”

I had a mail server lock up and die on me tonight. The data center replaced some hardware in order to get it to power back up. Everything started up fine, but I was unable to retrieve my own email. My mail client was complaining about timeouts on a single account. In looking at the log, I found some lines similar to these in the dovecot mail logs: